The Hugh Knowles Prize for Distinguished Achievement is awarded periodically to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to research or clinical practice in the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of hearing disorders. Nominations for the prize may be submitted at any time to Nina Kraus, chairman of the selection committee.

The 2013 Hugh Knowles Prize for Distinguished Achievement

The Knowles Hearing Center honored Dr. Zatorre with an award of $20,000. Dr. Zatorre delivered a lecture titled: Music Perception and Pleasure: Interactions between neocortical and striatal systems.

Robert Zatorre, based at the Montreal Neurological Institute, has been selected as the 2013 Hugh Knowles Prize winner for revolutionizing the field of the neuroscience of music and making key contributions to the hearing sciences. He has made seminal discoveries regarding the neuroanatomy of the auditory system, the relationship between the auditory and motor systems, hemispheric lateralization, language representation in bilingual brains, the interplay among the auditory, affect and reward systems, and auditory imagery and cognition.